Shariah-Compliant Finance gains a bridgehead in India

Shariah-Compliant Finance has gained a foothold in India and the story of this development illustrates the misleading nature of the industry.

A new Shariah-Compliant fund was just launched. But look closely at its name:

The Taurus Ethical Fund.

Regular readers of SFW know that we have addressed this before. Proponents of Shariah-Compliant Finance are fond of extolling the virtues of an investment philosophy that bans investments in things like alcohol, gambling and pornography.

Note this passage from the article:

Taurus Mutual Fund has described sharia funds as a “socially responsible way of investing in the capital markets”, with Naqvi saying that sharia investments have been generally left unscathed during the credit crunch.

There are two problems with this statement:

Number 1: Shariah investments have NOT been left unscathed during the credit crunch, as they refer to the global economic crisis. We’ve covered this lie before, including as recently as yesterday:

Number 2: as we have also covered before, “ethical” is a bad word to describe Shariah-compliance. Unless you have no problem with the barbaric doctrine which underlies the financial manifestation of Islamic law. Shariah promotes persecution of women and religious minorities and requires jihad to see that it is enforced everywhere. In addition to that, the world’s largest Shariah-Compliant bank is under U.S. and European Union sanctions for facilitating the funding of terrorism, ballistic missile programs and WMD projects in Iran.

When I attended the Harvard Law School celebration of Shariah-Compliant Finance, the panelists openly discussed removing references to Islam and Shariah from the financial product marketing materials and marketing the products as “ethical” investing in order to attract non-Muslim investors.